Karin Slaughter - Faithless

“You’re such a strong person,” Hank said. “I don’t understand why you let that boy control you.”

She would have explained it if she knew how. Men didn’t get it. They didn’t understand that it didn’t matter how strong you were, mentally or physically. What mattered was that need you felt in your gut, and how they made the ache go away. Lena used to have such disgust for women who let men knock them around. What was wrong with them? What made them so weak that they didn’t care about themselves? They were pathetic, getting exactly what they asked for. Sometimes she had wanted to slap them around herself, tell them to straighten up, stop being a doormat.

From the inside, she saw it differently. As easy as it was to hate Ethan when he wasn’t around, when he was there and being sweet, she never wanted him to leave. As bad as her life was, he could make it better or worse, depending on his mood. Giving him that control, that responsibility, was almost a relief, one more thing she didn’t have to deal with. And, to be honest, sometimes she hit him back. Sometimes she hit him first.

Every woman who’d ever been slapped around said she had asked for it, set off her boyfriend or husband by making him mad or burning dinner or whatever it was they used to justify having the shit beaten out of them, but Lena knew for a fact that she brought out Ethan’s bad side. He had wanted to change. When she first met him, he was trying very hard to be a different person, a good person. If Hank knew this particular fact, he would be shocked if not sickened. It wasn’t Ethan who caused the bruises, it was Lena. She was the one who kept pulling him back in. She was the one who kept baiting him and slapping him until he got angry enough to explode, and when he was on top of her, beating her, fucking her, she felt alive. She felt reborn.

There was no way she could have brought a baby into this world. She would not wish her fucked-up life on anyone.

Hank leaned his elbows on his knees. “I just want to understand.”

With his history, Hank of all people should understand. Ethan was bad for her. He turned her into the kind of person she loathed, and yet she kept going back for more. He was the worst kind of addiction because no one but Lena could understand the draw.

Musical trilling came from the bedroom, and it took Lena a second to realize the noise was her cell phone.

Hank saw her start to stand and said, “I’ll get it,” going into the bedroom before she could stop him. She heard him answer the phone, say, “Wait a minute.”

He came back into the kitchen with his jaw set. “It’s your boss,” he said, handing her the phone.

Jeffrey’s voice was as dire as Hank’s mood. “ Lena,” he began. “I know you’ve got one more day on your vacation, but I need you to come in.”

She looked at the clock on the wall, tried to think how long it would take to pack and get back to Grant County. For the first time that week, she could feel her heart beating again, adrenaline flooding into her bloodstream and making her feel like she was waking up from a long sleep.

She avoided Hank’s gaze, offering, “I can be there in three hours.”

“Good,” Jeffrey said. “Meet me at the morgue.”

Sara winced as she wrapped a Band-Aid around a broken fingernail. Her hands felt bruised from digging and small scratches gouged into the tips of her fingers like tiny pinpricks. She would have to be extra careful at the clinic this week, making sure the wounds were covered at all times. As she bandaged her thumb, her mind flashed to the piece of fingernail she had found stuck in the strip of wood, and she felt guilty for worrying about her petty problems. Sara could not imagine what the girl’s last moments had been like, but she knew that before the day was over, she would have to do just that.

Working in the morgue, Sara had seen the terrible ways that people can die- stabbings, shootings, beatings, strangulations. She tried to look at each case with a clinical eye, but sometimes, a victim would become a living, breathing thing, beseeching Sara to help. Lying dead in that box out in the woods, the girl had called to Sara. The look of fear etched into every line of her face, the hand grasping for some hold on to life- all beseeched someone, anyone, to help. The girl’s last moments must have been horrific. Sara could think of nothing more terrifying than being buried alive.

The telephone rang in her office, and Sara jogged across the room to answer before the machine picked up. She was a second too late, and the speaker echoed a screech of feedback as she picked up the phone.

“Sara?” Jeffrey asked.

“Yeah,” she told him, switching off the machine. “Sorry.”

“We haven’t found anything,” he said, and she could hear the frustration in his voice.

“No missing persons?”

“There was a girl a few weeks back,” he told her. “But she turned up at her grandmother’s yesterday. Hold on.” She heard him mumble something, then come back on the line. “I’ll call you right back.”

The phone clicked before Sara could respond. She sat back in her chair, looking down at her desk, noticing the neat stacks of papers and memos. All of her pens were in a cup and the phone was perfectly aligned with the edge of the metal desk. Carlos, her assistant, worked full-time at the morgue but he had whole days when there was nothing for him to do but twiddle his thumbs and wait for someone to die. He had obviously kept himself busy straightening her office. Sara traced a scratch along the top of the Formica, thinking she had never noticed the faux wood laminate in all the years she had worked here.

She thought about the wood used to build the box that held the girl. The lumber looked new, and the screen mesh covering the pipe had obviously been wrapped around the top in order to keep debris from blocking the air supply. Someone was keeping the girl there, holding her there, for his own sick purposes. Was her abductor somewhere right now thinking about her trapped in the box, getting some sort of sexual thrill from the power he thought he held over her? Had he already gotten his satisfaction, simply by leaving her there to die?

Sara startled as the phone rang. She picked it up, asking, “Jeffrey?”

“Just a minute.” He covered the phone as he spoke to someone, and Sara waited until he asked her, “How old do you think she is?”

Sara did not like guessing, but she said, “Anywhere from sixteen to nineteen. It’s hard to tell at this stage.”

He relayed this information to someone in the field, then asked Sara, “You think somebody made her put on those clothes?”

“I don’t know,” she answered, wondering where he was going with this.

“The bottom of her socks are clean.”

“He could have taken away her shoes after she got in the box,” Sara suggested. Then, realizing his true concern, she added, “I’ll have to get her on the table before I can tell if she was sexually assaulted.”

“Maybe he was waiting for that,” Jeffrey hypothesized, and they were both quiet for a moment as they considered this. “It’s pouring down rain here,” he said. “We’re trying to dig out the box, see if we can find anything on it.”

“The lumber looked new.”

“There’s mold growing on the side,” he told her. “Maybe buried like that, it wouldn’t weather as quickly.”

“It’s pressure treated?”

“Yeah,” he said. “The joints are all mitered. Whoever built this didn’t just throw it together. It took some skill.” He paused a moment, but she didn’t hear him talking to anyone. Finally, he said, “She looks like a kid, Sara.”

“I know.”

“Somebody’s missing her,” he said. “She didn’t just run away.”